August Offerings – Part XXIII: Something to Delight both Head and Heart

In the words of one writer, “A highly imaginative artist, Ms. Evans draws upon her early love affair with nature to produce imaginary landscapes midway between realism and abstraction. She takes enticing dreamlike vignettes and projects them onto her canvas in ways that playfully challenge perception as we know it.”

The plastic menus with faint ketchup smears,
The water rings on wrinkled paper mats,
Wouldn’t have bugged us then. But it’s been years.
We wipe and talk. Summed up, our lives are ruts
Disguised by cheer. His lipsticked coffee mug
Must be replaced. I struggle through a joke
He doesn’t get, half-listen to him brag
About his car. He offers me a smoke.
I say I quit. Our burgers come. We eat
Like restless kids who long to get away
From boring grown-up talk. We have to wait
Five minutes for the check, and then we’re free
To disappear from one another’s view,
Wondering what we wanted to renew.

Reflections in Summer: Antonio Porchia

“Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.”

French painter Carole Bressan (born 1973) is a graduate of the University of Visual Arts in Rennes.

“To this generation I would say:
Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.” – Edgar Lee Masters, American poet, biographer, dramatist, and author of “Spoon River Anthology,” who was born 23 August 1868.

In the words of one critic, “‘Spoon River Anthology’…is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of a fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ home town.” The first poem in the anthology – “The Hill” – serves as an introduction:

“The Hill”

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife —
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one? —
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire,
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag —
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution? —
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying —
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.

American Art – Part II of III: Max Ginsburg

In the words of one critic, “Max Ginsburg’s paintings are about people, the people one finds on the streets of New York. Simply put, he finds beauty in unglamorous reality. His paintings explore the range of daily human life, concerned as much with life’s ironies and social injustices, as with its many joys. He paints people that he can identify with, real people with regular lives.”

Reflections in Summer: Josh Gates

“Travel does not exist without home….If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.”

A Second Poem for Today

“Tree”
By Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Here is one critic describing the artistry of Russian painter Victor Kinus (born 1957): “Victor Kinus is an accomplished Russian painter who has created a considerable body of work with musical themes. His cubist inspired paintings contain intertwined elements of representationalism and symbolic abstraction that capture the multidimensional way in which we experience music. The listener watches the performer and hears with their ears, their hearts, their memory and their dreams all at the same time.”

Reflections in Summer: David Almond

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you’re off on a journey of exploration and discovery.”

“Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” – R. D. Laing, Scottish psychiatrist and author of “The Politics of Experience,” who died 23 August 1989.

Some quotes from the work of R. D. Laing:

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”
“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
“Few books today are forgiveable.”
“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.”
“In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.”
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.”
“Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a ‘dream’ is going crazy.”
“We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”
“We are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”
“Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing ‘the facts.’ We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the ‘evidence.’”
“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
“The Lotus opens. Movement from earth, through water, from fire to air. Out and in beyond life and death now, beyond inner and outer, sense and non-sense, meaning and futility, male and female, being and non-being, Light and darkness, void and full. Beyond all duality, or non-duality, beyond and beyond. Disincarnation. I breathe again.”

Italian painter Sergio Turle lives and works in Milan.

Reflections in Summer: Washington Irving

“There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations.”

It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.

The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
It will not hurt me when I am old.

Back from the Territory – Art: Joanie Ragee

Joanie Ragee is in an Inuit Sculptor.

Back from the Territory, I share this with you, before I light out again.

Below – “Bear”; “Dancing Bear.”

Reflections in Summer: Andre Gide

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

American Art – Part III of III: Bud Hambleton

In the words of one writer, “Bud Hambleton was born in Jamestown, New York. As a boy he moved to Rochester, New York and in 1972 he and his wife, Carolyn and family moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts. From 1974- 1979 inclusive, he established the Hambleton Gallery on Nantucket, managed by his wife, and showing not only his sculpture, but other painters and sculptors. Hambleton uses arc-welded Cor-ten steel as his medium for both figurative and non-objective images. At times he applies color to sculptures-with others he allows natural weathering of the material to transpire.”